I am on a working vacation on the island of St John’s in the US Virgin Islands, which has a fantastic view of the Caribbean Sea. It being the Monday before Thanksgiving, I encountered a frequent problem for locals and international travelers: the dreaded IP location redirections that did not account for our location. As I was barraged with hundreds of Black Friday deal emails today, a few caught my attention.
The first was Logitech’s sale, perfect as I am looking for a new mouse and keyboard. When I clicked the link, I was redirected to the Change Location to select my preference.
Getting this selector landing page is confusing, where do I click? I am technically in the US so do I click the United States?
St John Island is officially a territory of the United States after it was purchased from the Danish in 1917 and granted citizenship to residents in 1927. You do not need a passport to visit; they use the US Dollar and, for all practical purposes, part of the United States. They are part of the US postal system, meaning it is the same cost to send a package to the Virgin Islands as it would be to Boston. FedEx and UPS put the USVI under their international shipping rate cards.
This creates the question of where you set your redirect for the islands or do you? You don’t know if they are residents or on vacation. Maybe there are not enough users to do anything but if you are not tracking how do you know?
Detect and Confirm
Since I just did a podcast and a few articles on IP Location Detection, I was curious what the other 25 Black Friday deal offers I received today would respond. Most of the sites brought up the offer page. I did not see any redirects so I suspect either they don’t have IP location in place, have USVI set correctly and what I realized later after seeing my local store listed, a cookie with my location and shipping destination. I clicked on some of the multinationals in incognito to eliminate my cookies and had similar results.
For a few of the results, I did get a detection indicating I was not in the US, which required me to confirm and select a market. UnderArmour detected me to be in the USVI but the image was broken.
Analytics Questions
As we suggested in our overview, track analytics. With so many Americans traveling during the holiday, it makes sense to track your redirects on the campaigns.
The above redirect chain is the hops upon clicking the offer, taking me to the country selector. Did they, I buy? These are my questions.
- Did the users select a market or abandon the flow? What did they choose?
- Did the system track the redirects, and how many got a selector?
- Who gets credit for the transaction?
- Does this update my location – note I did not change the address – it had it shipped to my home address.
